At first glance, this seems like an interesting and wise decision. After all, Baen has been doing this for over a decade. O’Reilly has been DRM-free forever, too, and Tor just started recently. But an interesting quirk of the model is that HBR seems to be taking a sort of “hybrid” approach. The cheaper editions of its e-books it sells via Amazon and iTunes will still have DRM, and you’ll pay almost twice as much ($18 vs. about $10 for one example) for a DRM-free version direct from HBR’s website. (Though professors who assign the books as course material can get their students a 50% discount, and organizations buying e-books in “bulk” can get a discount starting at just 10 copies of the e-book.)

Will this strategy work for HBR? It just might. The sorts of textbooks and nonfiction that HBR publishes have a different market with different needs from mass-market fiction. And purchasers of such books might just be willing to pay extra for an e-book they can use anywhere they need without having to crack the DRM first.

The really interesting thing, I think, is not so much how many different publishers are starting to try DRM-free approaches, but just how many different ways they’re starting to do it in. The more things like this publishers try, the more we all learn about what will work and what won’t. And so e-book publishing goes DRM-free, a little bit at a time.

Check These Out!

Chris Meadows, Editor of TeleRead, has been writing about e-books and mobile devices since 1999: first for ThemeStream, later for Jeff Kirvin's Writing on Your Palm, and then for TeleRead starting in 2006. He has also contributed a few articles to The Digital Reader along the way. Chris has bought e-books from Peanut Press/eReader, Fictionwise, Baen, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, the Humble Bundle, and others. He is a strong believer in using Calibre to keep his library organized.